Tag Archives: Australia

Here are a few of my personal favorites from the 2012 Triple J Hottest 100, as broadcast on Australia Day 2013. You can listen to all 100 songs on Triple J’s superb website.

I love the Hottest 100, since it helps me discover all sorts of new music that I’d normally never get to hear. So, in no particular order, here are a few of my new finds. I hope you enjoy them as well.

Birds of Tokyo: “This Fire”
(This band is actually from Perth, and not from Northcote, as you might expect.)

Loon Lake: “Cherry Lips”
(Not a Garbage cover, but an insanely catchy song from this Melbourne band.)

alt-J: “Breezeblocks”
(You can also call this band “∆”, if you’re so inclined.)

Hermitude: “Hyperparadise”
(A remix by Flume takes this one to the next level.)

Sugar Gliders in NYC: Fuhgeddaboudit

A brief work discussion on sugar gliders led me to research if they’re legal in New York City. Turns out that these strange-but-cute marsupials are legal in New York State… but not in the five boroughs. That’s shitty.

So, if you have a sugar glider and you’re moving to NYC, keep it on the down-low, or hand it off to a friend before you move. Also, don’t release your sugar glider into the sewer system or it’ll grow to gargantuan size before attacking Manhattan.

You Don’t Need a Dingo Licence in New South Wales

Once you do web research of that nature, you can’t stop. As such, I learned that, in New South Wales, it’s only legal to keep three types of native mammal:

Admit it, you’d never heard of a spinifex hopping-mouse until this moment. That’s okay. Me, too. Anyway, those last two (i.e. the cute, cuddly mice) require a licence. Dingoes: no licence needed. Note that sugar gliders are not in the list above. This means no sugar gliders as pets in NSW.

Get your spinifex hopping-mouse licence at the DECC . Nothing I can do about the sugar glider situation, though. Sorry.

Koalas, the creatures that singlehandedly prove Darwin’s Theory of Evolution, have to conserve every last bit of energy for eating, mating (apparently koala porn is intense), more eating, and moving from tree to tree, which they only do at night.

However, wherever you find koalas, you’ll also find drop bears. If you think that polar bears were the only bears to attack humans unprovoked, you are tragically mistaken. Drop bears basically don’t give a fuck, and will use their massive claws to latch onto the faces of anyone unfortunate enough to look directly at them.

As you can see, I chose discretion as the better part of valor, photographing this drop bear, with his fearsome claws, from a safe angle. Should you ever find yourself beset by a drop bear, you won’t even be able to kiss your ass goodbye, since the fearsome beast will be covering your face, which will soon cease to exist.

If possible, any would-be rescuer must play some jazz music (too small a body of research exists to explain why this is so successful) and scratch the drop bear between its ears. with the other hand, the paws must be massaged until the claws relax. This is more difficult than one may imagine, since the drop bear is, at this point, still destroying your face, and, as such, is not sitting still.

Once all four paws have come loose, the drop bear can be picked up by the scruff of the neck and held against the nearest gum tree, which it will grip with a speed and intensity which is both amazing and frightening.